


Bridges (burning of; building of)

by paperclipbitch



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Gen, Guilt, Letters, Not Prime Time, Post X-Men: First Class
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-03
Updated: 2015-07-03
Packaged: 2018-04-07 13:06:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4264296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It turns out that Emma is worse at staying out of Raven’s head than Charles ever was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bridges (burning of; building of)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [afrocurl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/afrocurl/gifts).



> Written for **afrocurl** for the Not Prime Time exchange. In their prompt suggestions, **afrocurl** mentioned Raven writing unsent letters to Charles, which I what I've worked from here. I don't know why I thought it might be anything other than an angstbucketfest, but, sorry about that!

Emma’s a diamond again, an angry glitter, while her fingers tap against the desk with odd chiming sounds that shiver against Raven’s spine.

Even when she’s shifted into Emma in her diamond form, sometimes as a decoy, sometimes to annoy, sometimes just to see what it’s like – well, she’s never quite _diamond_ , there’s still the malleability of skin in there somewhere. 

There’s a tension strung between all of them, a damp finger run around the edge of a glass – or perhaps Emma, on one of her worse nights – that Raven doesn’t remember from even the earliest days of Charles’ attempt to scrape up a team or an army or a family that didn’t leave him with as many awkward silences as his existing one with Raven did. She remembers being nervous, being shy, being occasionally embarrassed; but she doesn’t remember this crowded sense of there being too many people and too many agendas in the same room. It was probably there, but it wasn’t this claustrophobic.

Perhaps Erik’s helmet shields him from the worst of this, from Janos glaring at anyone who gets close to him, from Emma’s favourite form of passive aggression, from Angel’s slammed doors and sulking. Perhaps he just can’t see anyone’s agenda but his own, the rest of them reduced to background noise.

Raven looks at Emma’s sparkling tapping fingers. “Next time we have a cash flow problem, maybe we should just sell a couple,” she says, leaving a threat unspoken.

Erik’s head turns a little at that, and she can’t read his expression; it’s something about how Raven never used to be like this, but then the years are passing and they’re all changing and anyway, Raven remembers a time when Erik looked at Charles like he held the sun too.

-

The resolution that Raven made when she walked away from Charles on that beach and told herself that her life was different now lasted perhaps a month, when she was caught up in Erik’s plans and in forming their new group and in seeing the world with a sense of freedom she’d not even been entirely sure she’d been craving until she had it. And then, after that initial heat burned off, there was the recollection that whatever his faults, whatever her unfulfilled needs, Charles was still the closest thing she still had to family and she’d left him paralysed and trapped to directly oppose him with the help of his best friend.

Raven tells herself over and over that she doesn’t feel guilty, but even with practice, she doesn’t get any better at the lie.

The silence is the worst part. Raven’s memories before Charles are dim and wavery and desperately sad, and for the majority of her life, there’s been nothing _but_ Charles. To go from seeing him daily, to reading his every thought even without telepathic powers, to not being able to ever speak to him, is difficult, a rough adjustment. She finds herself turning to speak to him before remembering that he isn’t there, occasionally picks up the phone so she can give him her news before recalling that that isn’t an option any more, bridges burned and the need for secrecy overwhelming everything else. Sometimes she wonders if Erik feels the same way; like a piece of him has been left behind, and everything else is struggling to catch up.

It turns out that Emma is worse at staying out of Raven’s head than Charles ever was, or at least is worse at hiding it; she only ever tells Raven news of Charles when Raven’s been worrying about him, drawing out the information like a trump card, and Raven can never figure out if she’s being kind or playing some kind of game Raven doesn’t know the rules of yet, just that it’s cruel, a punch to the heart every time.

-

In the end, Raven settles for the simplest form of communication: she finds herself a space and a quiet moment and she starts to write a letter.

At first, it’s difficult: her pen stutters on the page, she has to keep crossing through words, and in the end she can’t frame the apology at all. It occurs to her that she’s sorry for less of it than Charles would maybe want her to be, and in any case she can’t find enough words that sound sincere and not just bitter. She is sorry about the way they can’t talk to each other anymore, the way things have been severed so completely and so brutally, but most of the time she isn’t sorry that she left. Raven had to leave for both of them; her timing could’ve been better, and preferably Charles wouldn’t have had a bullet in his spine when she went, but they couldn’t have continued the way that they were.

In the end, Raven doesn’t apologise at all, and settles for the simplest selection of sharply painful words instead: _I miss you_.

After that, it gets easier, describing their hideouts, their missions, their allies, their in-jokes and petty quarrels and complaining over who cooks dinner or who picks what they watch on television. For all that they’re a team of mutants, there’s more normality here than their enemies would suppose. More humanity than any humans would allow them.

When she’s finished, Raven’s covered five sides of paper in increasingly small writing; her hand is aching and her eyes feel blurred and there’s a chasm of sorts in her chest, as though she scooped out all of her emotions and determination and spilled them across the paper, gave them to Charles for safekeeping like she did when she was younger and didn’t know any different, any better.

For a moment, a wild, breathless moment, Raven actually considers sending it. Actually considers putting it into an envelope and writing the address of that Westchester house that she tries not to think about on it, and putting it in the post and letting Charles receive it, read it over his tea and toast one morning, a barrage of words after so much silence. When she tries to picture his reactions, his expressions, though, she can’t; the image in her mind of him has stagnated, become a photograph, and she can’t remember exactly what his smile looked like, where the lines between his eyebrows formed when he frowned.

Charles isn’t really her brother; he never really was. And whatever he is to her now, it’s long gone and unrecognisable and even if she’d like to send this olive branch of a letter, she can’t. 

Instead, Raven folds it up small and hides it beneath a small stack of her belongings, the words crammed flat and buried, though she feels them all the same.

-

That should have been the end of it, of course, the aborted attempt at reconciliation that she couldn’t bring herself to see through. It should have told her everything she needed to know, and she could have moved on, knowing that Charles Xavier was alive and safe and managing, to some degree or another.

It should have been enough.

Instead, Raven carries on writing. They’re not diary entries, her day recorded neatly to her imaginary almost-nearly-brother but really just for herself; every time, she lets herself believe that this one might finally find its way to Charles, might start building back their bridge a brick at a time. She tells him things she won’t tell anyone else, won’t admit to anyone else, and sometimes it scares her, that she’s still so willing to lay herself vulnerable for someone who has already proven himself incapable of protecting her, of not hurting her. His intentions are good but, then, Charles’ intentions were _always_ good, and, well, look at the world now.

Erik builds her up, day by day, into something magnificent, something more than she would ever have been, a scared little girl hiding behind the all-American blonde, and they talk about their mission and their hopes and the world as it is and should be. He’s not trying to be her brother, and Raven doesn’t mind, but they never discuss the past, let it lie like an unquiet corpse between them. 

_You never knew either of us_ , she tells Charles, blunt, the words in curling black across the page, but then she hesitates. He probably knew both of them better than they were ever aware, and knew how this was going to end, and still hoped for better, prayed for them to be more than they really were. Or maybe Raven doesn’t mean _more_ ; perhaps she just means _different_. Erik believes in improving yourself, but not in changing yourself. Raven, able to change herself with every breath of the wind, perhaps needs that in her life; still, it was nice, once, to have that kind of blind faith directed at her, however misguided it was.

Erik knows her differently to how Charles knew her, his eyes scalpel-sharp and unrepentant, but he never pretends she’ll be something she could never be. It’s a relief, and a disappointment.

-

Sometimes, Raven thinks that Erik wears his helmet not to protect himself from Charles, but to protect himself from Emma. Charles has perhaps washed his hands of the both of them, or has told himself that he has – because Charles never gives up on anything, on anyone, no matter how hard they beg him to – or perhaps hasn’t yet configured Cerebro to find them. Emma, however, is present and sharp and Raven used to think that she was tactless or frantic to find her tongue after Shaw had had it held for her for so long, but now she thinks that Emma just doesn’t care about the damage her words cause. She can pick a phrase or a thought or an emotion out of your head, and lay it out so you can see just how badly it stings, and all the while she doesn’t blink, doesn’t back down.

_Sometimes I wonder how you stayed so kind_ , Raven tells Charles. _With distant parents and that rattling house and the world crawling into your head, you didn’t need to be that boy who invited me in. I don’t think I ever thought of you being lonely, with all those voices in your head, but maybe you were; maybe it was the loneliness that saved you, or you’d have heard all those people’s thoughts and judged the world by them and let them make you cruel._

It’s just as well she knows, deep down, that Charles will never see these letters; she can say things she’d never say aloud, can figure out things that maybe he believes she worked out years ago. 

In truth, Raven probably shouldn’t be letting Charles still be a presence in this new life that has no space at all for him in it, but he’s more than that ghost she and Erik let colour their every conversation; he’s part of her childhood and part of her adulthood and part of the person she made herself into, whatever she wants to pretend. He might have gone about it the wrong way, but Charles always had her wellbeing at heart; Erik says he does too, and she thinks that yes, he did, once.

Everybody’s won and everybody’s lost and sometimes she wonders whether Charles would still know her if she slipped on another’s skin and a handful of the mental walls that Emma has taught her to build, if she walked past his school just long enough to catch a glimpse of him in a window, prove to herself that he was real, that for a few years they were almost something like happy. Is her mind still a beacon he’d know anywhere, or has he taught himself to peel back, to only cleave to those he knows won’t leave him to die.

( _I didn’t do that_ , she writes, over and over, letter after letter, _I knew that you would survive_ , but she didn’t, and at that moment, she didn’t care, and perhaps _that’s_ what she’s really sorry about, why she can’t let this go after all.)

-

_Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents._

December is cold and Erik won’t touch Hanukkah anymore, and Emma eats candy canes and no one feels festive; not this year, not last year, not however long it’s been that they’ve been dragging themselves on, growing ever stronger, ever distant from those children whose naïveté still makes her wince in hindsight.

Raven remembers Charles reading _Little Women_ to her; how she wanted to be Jo, how she wanted sisters, wanted to be part of a family like that, one that wasn’t formed of mutual desperation. They both cried when the girls’ father came home, and then pretended that they hadn’t. God, her childhood seems less real every day.

She sends a blank Christmas card in the end, no message, no gifts, the address printed in the sort of capitals that anyone could have written, and gets Azazel to post it for her from somewhere miles away where the stamps won’t align: as anonymous as possible. Emma arches an eyebrow, but doesn’t call her on it, doesn’t tell Erik; Raven assumes that’s her Christmas gift after all.

She knows Charles will know it’s from her anyway; in fact, she’s counting on it.


End file.
